Planetside Bits

Planetside ist ja ein cooles Spiel und wenn ihr jetzt etwas mehr über die Technik von dem MMOFPS wissen wollt, dann lest es euch durch:

I'm giving a presentation at CGDC on the Planetside engine and how it is organized. The proceedings will be available afterwards. There just isn't as much techy stuff going into engines these days as there used to be. So much of it is handled by the hardware that the basic processes are all about the same. I haven't nailed down dynamic shadows, light sources, or decals in any great detail yet, but I have a number of strategies I am going to employ. Whatever looks the best and compromises the frame the least is where I'll be going. I do a lot of multi-texture stuff, environment mapping, bump mapping, light mapping, etc. to make things look good. I will continue that basic theme throughout. I am using the Granny character animation system from Rad Game Tools. This does full mesh deformation and extremely smooth interpolated character animation. We will be using hardware vertex shaders for skinning. The latest character models, which you guys have not seen screenshots of yet because we just got them in, look really sweet. I am writing a customized virtual machine for the particle system. I only have a placeholder one in right now. The completed particle system will be extremely powerful and handle all of our weapon effects and many environmental effects as well. Sorry, I know that's not a lot of information. When it comes to game engines, I give myself two absolute directives. First, look great. Second, don't trash the frame rate. I do not go after cool whiz-bang techie things if I can find a cheaper route that looks good and does not sacrifice framerate. However, the converse it true as well, if there is *any* whiz-bang techie thing, whether it's vertex morphing, vertex shaders, dot3 lighting, you name it, that can be implemented to produce killer effects and *not* compromise frame rate, I will do that as well.

12.02.2001, 00:44 [Joe]